It Chapter Two is a very interesting movie, and a very scary one. Its problem (or It’s problem; hard to go grammatically wrong here) is that it isn’t very scary when interesting, and it isn’t very interesting when scary. And it’s too long any way you slice It, which, alas, no editor seems to have done.

The action picks up 27 years after the original, which cleverly set itself in 1989, which means we’re now more or less in the present. The evil clown Pennywise, much like certain species of insects and of course Mary Poppins, has a habit of returning every few decades. The kids who were terrorized in the first movie have grown up and mostly moved away from their hometown of Derry, Maine, putting the past behind them.

The lone holdout, hunkered down in the town’s library, is Mike (Isaiah Mustafa), who calls up all his old pals after something wicked his way comes. Bill (James McAvoy) is now a screenwriter, Richie’s a comedian played by Bill Hader, Ben has slimmed down to become Jay Ryan, and Eddie’s a financial type played by James Ransone. Beverly, who left an abusive parent for an abusive spouse, is played by Jessica Chastain.

The group reunites at a Chinese restaurant to discover that they have only tattered memories of the original film. (I can sympathize; I’m like that with a lot of middling movies myself.) But over the course of the meal, they gradually recall more of what happened, until the dessert – let’s call them misfortune cookies – makes things clear. Pennywise is back, and it’s up to these pound-foolish mortals to vanquish him.

The film, from returning director Andy Muschietti and writer Gary Dauberman – and based on the work of Stephen King, who gets an amusing cameo as a second-hand dealer – makes much of the notion that not all the demons from our childhoods are of supernatural origin. Bullies, fights with friends, words misspoken in anger and all the other vicissitudes of growing up continue to haunt the kids who once branded themselves The Losers Club. (A surprisingly large portion of the film flashes back to the younger characters and their look-alike actors.)

Kudos to the filmmakers for dramatizing normal as well as paranormal trauma, and for (mostly) eschewing jump scares in favour of creeping dread, which is harder to put on the screen, but always scarier when done well. But where It Chapter 2 falters is the decision to have each member of the Losers Club track down an item from his or her childhood, which requires a trip to a spooky location, a grapple with an evil entity, and a getaway.

It adds up to six separate quests – the term “horcrux” was heard more than once in the wake of the film’s press screening – and it pushes the running time to nearly three hours. That’s a lot of time spent clowning around, bogged down in mid-level terrors on the way to what looks to be a final showdown between good and evil. There’s a superb 100 minutes of movie in the film’s 169 minutes.

On the plus side, the actors, both young and old, do great work in their roles. Hader in particular is perfect at popping the tension with a barbed joke, which is a useful defense mechanism with all those red balloons floating around. And Chastain not only brings gravitas to her character, but is the spitting image of her younger self, played by Sophia Lillis.

Given the literary source material, we can be fairly certain that the studio won’t trot out a Chapter 3, although it might be weirdly amusing to see a sequel set in near-future 2043. But the best course of action for now is probably to close the book on It.